Bill Nye: “…right now in
the summer of 2016, my overwhelming concern is human-caused global climate
change. I strongly believe it’s the most
serious kind of trouble, and it’s coming at us like a runaway train.” “Promote Reason, Prevent Climate
Catastrophes: Let’s Get ‘Er Done.” Skeptical Inquirer (Sept.-Oct.
2016). Nye, “The Science Guy,” is
well-known via his TV shows and more. He
is CEO of the Planetary Society.

Ecology: the
branch of science that deals with the interrelations between the physical
environment and the life it sustains.

Mitigation: to
lessen force or intensity of the climate catastrophe by confronting the causes
of the increasing floods, fires, drought, storms, all extreme weather. To
avoid the worst consequences, humans must stop using fossil fuels now in order
to reduce C02 to 350ppm swiftly. Specifically we must end the subsidies to the fossil fuels
industry, make fossil fuels reflect their true costs, and subsidize wind and
sun industries.

Adaptation: countless human adjustments on a massive
scale against these conditions of climate catastrophe—flood walls, building new
cities inland, forest fire brakes, massive clearance of trees and shrubs away
from housing areas, local food production, biking and walking.

The hitch: we don’t have
much time. For both
mitigation and adaptation, humans must organize quickly with the scope of a Manhattan
Project, Marshall Plan, Apollo Space Project.

Contents: Urgency of Global Warming and Mitigating and Adapting
to Its Consequences, Newsletter #1, August 28, 2016

Coming to Grips

Holding one’s hand up to a forest fire or flood to stop it will
kill you or put you into a straightjacket, unless many hands work in many
ways. OMNI’s many hands are responding
to C02 numerously and variously:
particularly our committee to keep carbon in the ground, OMNICCL; our OMNI350
Book Forum (for a decade); OMNI Earth Day; OMNI World Peace Wetland; OMNI
Climate Newsletters. And these we give
to the global movementfor peace, justice, andecology.

Part
One: Urgency

Books and Articles from
1990 to 2016 Explaining the Imminent Danger of Global Warming. Mitigations and Adaptations are discussed in
all of the books and articles also, at least briefly; for example, all agree
fossil fuels use must cease and quickly.

Part Two: Why So Little Public and Government Mitigation
and Adaptation?

Books on Power of Money in
US Politics for Scams, Denial, Lobbying, Campaign Finance, Bribery

Facing the Anthropocene:
Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System by Ian Angus (2016). Naming the present epoch Anthropocene is crucial to coping with the future. Humanity in the 21st century
faces radical changes in its physical environment, not just extreme weather,
but a crisis of the Earth as physical and
social system, caused by human activities.
Thus in the Anthropocene, survival “requires radical social change,
replacing fossil capitalism with an ecological civilization, ecosocialism.” (In the Appendix, Angus offers two important
clarifications of “Anthropocene.”)

PART THREE: MORE ON MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION

(Sometimes the distinction between the two concepts seems clear,
sometimes blurred. I have tried
throughout to follow the definitions given at the beginning. Dick)

MITIGATION

The books on urgency contain a steady insistence upon ending C02
fast and cite many ideas for accomplishing that goal.

Shelley Buonaiuto to Senator Boozman on Keeping Fossil Fuels in
the Ground

A CHRONOLOGICAL SAMPLE OF BOOKS AND ARTICLES
EXPRESSING THE URGENCY OF GLOBAL WARMING AS CLIMATE CATASTROPHE. Compiled by
Dick Bennett.

1867

Karl Marx, first volume of Capital
(1867), “with its warning of the metabolic rift in the human relation to
the earth”

1926

Vladimir Vernadsky, The
Biosphere, early Soviet use of key concept of integrated living organisms
and nonliving environment (not trans. into English until 1998). In the same time period Aleksei Pavlov
referred to the Anthropocene and anthropogenic era as the new mainly human
driven geological period.

1945-50 a major spike of warming “marking a Great Acceleration in
human impacts on the environment,” particularly in “fallout radionuclides from
nuclear weapons testing.”

1962

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. If undermined, the living processes of
Earth will “return in time” to haunt us.

1963

Rachel Carson, “Our Polluted Environment” introduced
the concept of ecosystem—an
integrated ecological perspective--to the US public, and “the need to take it
into account in all of our actions” (Foster, “The Anthropocene Crisis,”
11).

1973

First English appearance of word Anthropocene
in an article by Shantser in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

1980

E. P. Thompson. “Notes on
Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization.”
New Left Review (May-June).

1982.

Barry Commoner. The Closing
Circle. Aware of the rift in the
metabolism of the biosphere, warns of “the vast changes in the human relation
to the planet, beginning with the atomic age and the rise of modern… synthetic
chemistry

“WilliamCatton. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. There must be
limits to our tremendous appetite for population growth, energy, natural
resources, and consumer goods.

1988

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Established.IPCCis a scientific body under
the auspices of the United Nations (UN). It reviews and assesses the most
recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide
relevant to the understanding of climate change. It was first
established in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP),
and later endorsed by the United
Nations General Assembly through
Resolution 43/53.

--Colin Hocking, et al. Global
Warming and the Greenhouse Effect.
A textbook for grades 7 to 10. The earliest textbook for youths on climate
change of which I am aware.

1991

Edburg and Yablokov, Tomorrow
Will Be Too Late.

1992

Al Gore.
Earth in the Balance. (One of the earliest books inspired by the
IPCC reports.) Before
the expression “Green Apollo program” gained
usage, Gore “and numerous others” had urged such a program (Hertsgaard
272). “Gore had urged the U.S.
government to initiate a green Marshall Plan.”

Thomas
Casten.Turning Off the Heat: Why America Must Double Energy Efficiency to Save Money and
Reduce Global Warming. Notable
for having been published so early, and in fact he had started his warnings
about C02 in 1975.

Paul Crutzen’s essay “Geology of Mankind” in Nature suggests assigning term
“Anthropocene” to the present based upon the alteration of the atmosphere by
fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. The idea was formally studied and
accepted by the stratigraphy committee of the Geological Society of London,
which passed the idea up to the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Their decision is expected in 2016. (Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 108-110).

2004

Ross
Gelbspan.
Boiling Point:
How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are
Fueling the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster
Note the date—Gelbspan’s book the earliest strong book-length warning of
the climate cover-up that I know of.

2005

Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail
or Succeed. Diamond says that a
society can either see environmental
problems or not. If they recognize the problem they
can act to solve it or they can ignore it or they can take
ineffective action. (from Malcolm Cleveland)

Mark Lynas. High
Tide: News from a Warming World.From a review by Nicholas Lezardin The Guardian,25 March 2005. “It really ought to be
read by everyone. . . .a passionate argument, with much evidence, for us to do
something about the catastrophe facing the planet as a result of our dependency
on fossil fuels.” "If there's one
message above all that I want people to take from these pages," Lynas
writes, "it's this: that all the impacts described here are just the first
whispers of the hurricane of future climate change which is now bearing down on
us."

James
Bovard.Attention
Deficit Democracy.Why the public ignores political and
corporate frauds and swallows pervasive lies, why they are indifferent to facts
and increasingly incapable of judging when their rights and liberties are being
destroyed.2007

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_synthesis_report.htm
George Monbiot. Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Climate change “is the greatest danger the
world now faces” (212). Monbiot
favorably cites an article by Colin Forrest that makes the case that if CO2
concentrations in the atmosphere remain what they were in 2005, the average
temperature would reach 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. “Beyond this point, in other words, climate
change is out of our hands” (xi). The
“only means” to stop this rise “is for the rich nations to cut their greenhouse
gas emissions by 90 percent by 2030” (xii).
Monbiot tells why he thinks this is feasible.

Howard
Odum. Environment, Power, and Society.Discusses
the biosphere, the earth as a system, the metabolism of the earth’s thin outer
shell threatened by the overgrowth by capitalism.

2008

Mark Lynas.
Six Degrees: Our Future on a
Hotter Planet. Lynas
cites the Katrina hurricane flooding of New Orleans as “what the 21st
century may have in store for many more of us, in a thousand locations across
the world, as climate change accelerates” (14).
“With up to 6 degrees Celsius, or 10.6 degrees Fahrenheit, of global
warming in the cards over the next hundred years,” according to the IPCC, “will
we all…be reduced to eking out a living from shattered remains of
civilization…?” (15). Lynas is
optimistic humans can muster the scientific/technical knowledge and the
political will, but “we need to cut emissions [to 400 ppm to “keep us within
the two degrees safety target”] and do so within a decade” (300) (i.e. 2017).

James Gustave Speth. The
Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from
Crisis to Sustainability. “There is a bridge at the edge of the
world. But. . .there is not much time”
(13).

2009

James Hansen.
Storms of My Grandchildren: The
Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save
Humanity. “…we are running out of time” (xi). “It’s
crucial that we immediately recognize the need to reduce atmospheric carbon
dioxide to at most 350 ppm….” (xi). “…a
change of direction is urgent. This is
our last chance” (xii). “Our planet…is
in imminent danger of crashing” (277) yet our politicians hesitate to act. “…the biggest obstacle to
solving global warming is the role of money in politics, the undue sway of
special interests.” (x).

German Advisory Council on Global Change
(WBGU), led by Hans Schellnhuber, chief climate adviser to the government of
Germany, argued that 2 degrees centigrade temperature rise must be the limit,
which would “require bringing down atmospheric concentrations [of CO2] fast.”
“Greenhouse gas emissions had to fall at incredible speed.” Hertsgaard, Hot, 249.

Schellnhuber “put a new name on a set of ideas and policies that Al Gore
and numerous others had already proposed” (272).

Al Gore.
Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the
Climate Crisis.

Gore stresses urgency in every chapter. For example, Chap. 14: “In communicating the
urgency of the climate crisis….” (315).
Referring to the market economy, “change is urgently needed….” (Chap. 15, 320). Chap. 16, “We urgently need solutions to
remove the political obstacles that block us from confronting the mortal threat
of the climate crisis to the future of civilization.” [This is a magnificent textbook, illuminating
and stimulating in both text and graphics.
–D]

Larry Schweiger. Last
Chance.

“Decades of complacency and inattention…eight years of …Bush
administration coupled with procrastination and partisan politics of a divided
Congress have set the stage for enormous and permanent climatic
consequences....we must do much more much faster than we previously believed…to
divert a worldwide catastrophe” (8-9).
“We cannot take baby steps when much bolder action is required”
(6). Schweiger writes elsewhere of his
hope in the new President Obama, which was not realized. [Schweiger was president and CEO of the
National Wildlife Federation.]

2010

Robert Jensen. “In the Face of This Truth”

YES
MAGAZINE. It’s
time to talk honestly about collapse–no matter how others may
respond.

[Thomas Hardy’s poem ”In
Tenebris II” speaks to this argument, to paraphrase: every solid outlook, philosophy, ethic is
based upon knowledge of, a full look at the worst. Oddly (probably the result of being given
only two pages to make his case) Jensen doesn’t discuss major causes of “the
exceptional truth” of our unsustainable world—for example, the connected
capitalist economic and permanent war systems.
Yes! is usually upbeat, so this essay is important to remind us
that a beneficially positive spirit—Yes!—does not include denial, escape,
credulity, or wishful thinking. –Dick]Bill McKibben.
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough
New Planet. After
listing some of the massive changes to the earth in recent decades: “These
should come as body blows, as mortar barrages, as sickening thuds. The Holocene is staggered, the only world
that humans have known is suddenly reeling.
I am not describing what will happen if we don’t take action, or warning
of some future threat. This is the current inventory” (5). ”We need now to understand the world we’ve
created, and consider—urgently—how to live in it. . . .But hope has to be
real. It can’t be a hope that the
scientists will turn out to be wrong ,
or that President Barack Obama [or some other magic] can somehow fix
everything….Maturity is not the opposite of hope; it’s what makes hope
possible” (xiv).

Peter Ward.
The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a
World Without Ice Caps.

Introduction, “Miami Beached”: “What might make [the increase in sea
level] unique is the rate at which it is happening. There is every reason to believe that we are
on the cusp of the most rapid rate of sea level rise in Earth history….”(10).

Chap. 3, “The Flood of Humans”:
The correlation between increasing population and rising seas. “The rise in our numbers, more than any
other reason, will ensure the rise of the sea—which not only will happen but
also might be vastly underestimated unless we take immediate action” (90).

Gwynne
Dyer. Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World
Overheats. Warming will increase militarism and
wars. Without drastic reduction in C02
the planet will heat 4 degrees by 2060.

2011

Lester
Brown. World on the Edge:
How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse. Brown’s
long-developed “Plan B” urges “massive mobilization—at wartime
speed.” We did it during WWII.

Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. The “first era of global warming (“the battle
to prevent dangerous climate change”) began on June 23, 1988—the day James
Hansen told the U.S. Senate that man-made global warming had begun.” By the turn of the century “the second era,”
“the race to survive it had begun.” “On
the one hand, we must reverse global warming [lower the global temperature],
and quickly—before the climate system passes tipping points,” and we must “prepare
our societies for the serious climate impacts that are already in the pipeline”
(24-25).

2012Fred Guterl.The Fate of the Species:Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own
Extinction and How We Can Stop It. “A fine scientific explanation of our abuse of the natural world
that, despite the subtitle, does not explain how to stop it. “ KIRKUS
REVIEW

2013Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, The Climate
Change Scorecard, December 17, 2013. What,
in other words, is the worst that we could possibly face in the decades to
come? The answer: a nightmare scenario. So buckle your seat
belt. There’s a tumultuous ride ahead.TomAre We Falling Off
the Climate Precipice?Scientists Consider
Extinction byDahr Jamail.I
grew up planning for my future, wondering which college I would attend, what to
study, and later on, where to work, which articles to write, what my next book
might be, how to pay a mortgage, and which mountaineering trip I might like to
take next.
Now, I wonder about the future of our planet. During a recent visit with my
eight-year-old niece and 10- and 12-year-old nephews, I stopped myself from
asking them what they wanted to do when they grew up, or any of the
future-oriented questions I used to ask myself. I did so because the reality of
their generation may be that questions like where they will work could be replaced
by: Where will they get their fresh water? What food will be available? And
what parts of their country and the rest of the world will still be
habitable? Click
here to read more of this dispatch.2014

Joe Romm, News Investigation, NationofChange,
May 7, 2014:The National Climate
Assessment is the definitive statement of current and future impacts of carbon
pollution on the United
States. And the picture it paints is
stark: Inaction will devastate much of the arable land of the nation’s
breadbasket—and ruin a livable climate for most Americans. “Americans face
choices,” explains the Congressionally-mandated report by 300 leading climate
scientists and experts, which was reviewed by the National Academy of
Sciences. We’re already seeing serious climate impacts—such as more extreme
heat waves, droughts and deluges—and additional impacts are “now unavoidable.”

Naomi
Klein. This Changes Everything. “Faced with a crisis that
threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the
very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease
behind it. . . .from conventional sources of fossil fuels to even dirtier and
more dangerous versions….” (2). We must
“change the systems that are making the crisis inevitable” (4). It will require a “Marshall Plan for the
Earth,” which will cost “billions if not trillions of dollars,” but we can do
it if we have the will (5), if we the people quit “looking away” and declare “a
crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels” (6).

George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It:
Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. In his conclusion, “Four Degrees: Why this
Book Is Important” (pp. 239-42) Marshall recounts how for a “many years”
scientists focused on the catastrophic dangers of allowing global average
temperature to rise 2 degrees Centigrade above the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. Here Marshall discusses the increasing
conclusion “that four degrees is the actual future we face” (239). These scientists refer not to change, a
misleading euphemism, but to catastrophe,
Praised by Naomi Klein for having “the courage to look unblinkingly at this
existential crisis.”

2015

Nicholas Stern, Why Are We Waiting?“delay is dangerous. . . .I hope we can help
bring about the acceleration in action that is vital to the management of
climate change.” Stern’s book is for “understanding
why we have been moving too slowly….” (xviii). [A
high-level, sophisticated study that weighs seemingly all important factors of
the economics of climate change. Lord
Stern is the Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School
of Economics, President of the British Academy, and other distinguished
positions.. –Dick]

Peter Seidel.
There Is Still Time to Look at the Big Picture…and Act. In his Preface he writes about his earlier
(1998) book, Invisible Walls: Why We Ignore the
Damage We Inflict on Our Planet…and Ourselves.
“Since then,
environmental damage has only grown worse . . .It is clear that if we continue
on our current course our future will be grim indeed.” But “facing the dismal facts might get us to
think and change.” In his Recap p. 171,
first of all “We need to: recognize that we are now on a path leading to
catastrophe.”

2016

Ian Angus. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism
and the Crisis of the Earth System. The
“central theme of Ian Angus’s marvelous new book” is the “dialectical
interrelation between the acceleration into the Anthropocene and the
acceleration of a radical environmentalist imperative in response.” The “main achievement” of the book is the
bringing together” of “two aspects of the Anthropocene”: variously viewed as
the geological and the historical, the natural and social, the climate and
capitalism—in one single, integrated view” that “the world, under ‘business as
usual,’ is being catapulted into a new ecological phase—one less conducive to
maintaining biological diversity and a stable human civilization.” (from “Foreword” by J. B. Foster).

John Bellamy Foster. “The
Anthropocene Crisis.” (Monthly Review, Sept. 2016).From his Foreword
to Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene:
Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. Foster provides a short
history of the increasing awareness of the recently accelerated global warming
that has produced (possibly to be named) the Anthropocene epoch, given expanded
treatment in “Angus’s marvelous new book.”
Foster ends his essay by quoting Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Buddha’s
Parable of the Burning House,” in which Buddha exhorted the inhabitants to
leave at once, but they did not, but instead asked foolish questions.

Dolack, “No Planet for Optimists.” Z
Magazine (May 2016 ), 4-5. A dire conclusion based
upon recent studies:
Hansen, et al., in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics:
“swift action is necessary in the face of a ‘global emergency’”
because of “a future catastrophic rise in the oceans.”Science:
planet “already committed…to a six-meter rise in sea level,” which is
likely to inundate 444,000 square miles of land “where more than 375 million
people live today.”
Even if the goals committed to by the
Paris Climate summit in December 2015 were achieved (1.5 degrees Celsius above
pre-industrial levels), temperature globally would rise “nearly 3 degrees
Celsius by 2100.” “We have a global
emergency” and must drastically reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions quickly.
What to do? Because our economic system requires constant
growth, “There is no alternative to a massive change in industrial
activity.” --Dick

Here is an update on an important topic in Facing the Anthropocene. The 35th
International Geological Congress met in South Africa during August 2016. Their decision was pretty much what the book
predicted: These geologists are suggesting that a new geological “epoch”
should be established, named “Anthropocene,” that it should begin in 1945-1955,
and that it’s geological “marker” should include the “black carbon” deposited
by coal plants and other fossil fuel plants. –Art Hobson

PART TWO:

Why, Given the Urgency, Have So Little Mitigation and
Adaptation Been Achieved?

The following books explain why fossil fuels industrialists
and billionaires dislike the science of warming, how they have prevented its
spread, and why consequently many of the populace deny the scientific evidence
which might save them from extermination.

Naomi Oreskes,Erik M. M.
Conway.Merchants of
Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco
Smoke to Global Warming.
2011. "Merchants of Doubt should finally put to rest the question of
whether the science of climate change is settled. It is, and we ignore this
message at our peril."-Elizabeth Kolbert.
"Brilliantly reported and written with brutal clarity."-Huffington Post. Film based on book 2015. Merchants of Doubt was one of the most talked-about
climate change books of recent years, for reasons easy to understand: It tells
the controversial story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and
scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran
effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific
knowledge over four decades. The same individuals who claim the science of
global warming is "not settled" have also denied the truth about
studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to
the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive.
These "experts" supplied it.

Another Cause
of the Delay: the Cold War
John Bellamy Foster, “The
Anthropocene Crisis,” The Monthly Review (September
2016). The Foreword to Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism
and the Crisis of the Earth System. The
early vision of the earth system presented by Vladimir Vernadsky in The Biosphere (1926) and by his
contemporary Aleksei Pavlov’s use of the term anthropocene “were for a long time downplayed in the West” during
the Cold War. Vernadsky’s book was not
translated into English until 1998.
Despite the virtual interdiction of Soviet research, a special issue of Scientific American was published on the
biosphere in 1970, and in 1971 Barry Commoner’s book The Closing Circle appeared warning of “the vast changes in the
human relation to the planet” already under way, which found strong support in
the Soviet Union..

Why, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, do we still ignore
climate change? And what does it need for us to become fully convinced of what
we already know? http://www.climateconviction.org/

George
Marshall’s search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel
Prize-winning psychologists and the activists of the Texas Tea Party; the
world’s leading climate scientists and the people who denounce them; liberal
environmentalists and conservative evangelicals.

Along the way
his research raised other intriguing questions:

·Why do most people never talk about climate change, even people
with personal experience of extreme record breaking weather?

·Why did scientists, normally the most trusted professionals in our
society, become distrusted, hated, and the targets for violent abuse?

·Why do the people who say climate change is too uncertain become
more agitated about the threats of cell phones, meteorite strikes or alien
invasion?

·Why does having children make people less concerned about climate
change not more?

·And, why is Shell Oil so much more concerned about the threat
posed by its slippery floors than the threats posed by its products?

Don’t Even
Think About It argues that the answers to these questions do not lie in the
things that make us different and drive us apart, but rather in what we all
share: how our human brains are wired, our evolutionary origins, our
perceptions of threats, our cognitive blindspots, our love of storytelling, our
fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe.

With witty
and engaging stories, drawing on years of his own research, Marshall shows how
the scientific facts of climate change can become less important to us than the
social facts – the views of the people who surround us. He argues that our
values, assumptions, and prejudices can take on lives of their own, gaining
authority as they are shared, dividing people in their wake.

He argues
that once we understand what excites, threatens, and motivates us, we can
rethink and reimagine climate change, for it is not an impossible problem.
Rather, it is one we can halt if we can make it our common purpose and common
ground.

And so this
book does not talk in detail about the impacts of climate change or the things
that make us turn away. There are no graphs, data sets, or complex statistics,
because, in the end, all of the computer models and scientific predictions are
constructed around the most important and uncertain variable of all: whether
our collective choice will be to accept or to deny what the science is telling
us. And this, says Marshall, is the most engrossing and intriguing question of
all.

[Read his last chapter, “Four Degrees:
Why This Book Is Important,” in which he discusses the possibility “that
average global temperatures might rise over the threshold of 4 degrees Celsius
(7.2 degrees Fahrenheit”) 239.]

Peter Seidel, There Is Still Time to Look at the Big Picture…and Act (2015). This books has two parts, the first by Seidel:
Chapter 1: Putting the pieces
together. 2: the human record, 3: the
many problems. (Summary: “We are in
danger of bringing about our own demise.”)
4: being human, the human mind,
mental equipment, primary drives, 5:
social forces contributing to our inaction,
6: “We Can Change,” “the most important things we need to do.” [Most of the books above, perhaps all at least
to small degree, follow the same format:
clear and present danger, solutions.
Analysis of why we humans, who caused the peril, have been so
unresponsive came later.] The second
part of this book, “Our Planet Today,” by Gary Gardner, surveys what is
happening in the world today in 9 main areas, beginning with population and
consumption.

PART THREE: FURTHER READING

MITIGATION

Suggestions
are legion, especially for technological fixes.

The books above on urgency alert readers to the necessity
of lessening
the extremity of climate catastrophe by reducing CO2 and temperature. Many
books and articles seek to remove the root causes of CO2 and temperature rise,
including the economic system based upon profit, capital accumulation, growth,
advertising, particularly the US form of capitalism.

Shelley
Buonaiuto’s Letter to Senator Boozman explains to him that to preserve
our planet, action is vital to curb carbon pollution

By SHELLEY
BUONAIUTO SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE.
Posted: February 10, 2014 at 2:05 a.m.

Sen. John Boozman recently signed a letter to
President Barack Obama asking him to halt Environmental Protection Agency
regulations on power plants. During the Senate Environment and Public Works
Committee oversight hearing, Boozman expressed concern about the impact of
regulations on energy prices, affecting the poor.

Although I respect his caution, if we do
nothing to halt carbon pollution, the impact will be catastrophic and the
greatest effect will be on the poor.

Boozman asked, “Can climate science
adequately predict and explain the complexity of climate change?” Climate
change is admittedly complex, but the modeling is accurate. Models are
long-term, from decades to millions of years. They can’t be evaluated by simply
looking out one’s window at today’s weather.

Some predictions have, in fact, been
conservative. According to Scientific American, a climate scientist at the NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research has
obtained results indicating warming “will come on faster, and be more intense,
than many current predictions,” and “impacts of that warming … sea level rise,
drought, floods and other extreme weather, could hit earlier and harder than
many models project.”

Boozman asked if regulations would have
significant impact on global climate. Regulations were effective in the 1970s
when CFCs were regulated and phased out due to their role in ozone depletion.
But there is another approach to cutting carbon emissions: carbon fees andrebates. At least 10 countries currently
have such a fee, along with many local and regional governments. Sweden enacted a carbon fee in 1991, and by 2008
Sweden’s
emissions decreased by more than 40 percent. In 2008, British Columbia implemented a carbon fee,
rebated to citizens through lowered income taxes. Emissions fell 10 percent by
2011 as compared with a 1.1 percent decline for the rest of Canada.

What are the costs of not acting? The
Business Coalition report, “Natural Capital at Risk: The Top 100 Externalities
of Business,” estimates the economic costs of greenhouse-gas emissions, loss of
natural resources, loss of nature-based services such as carbon storage in
forests, and pollution-related health costs at $4.7 trillion a year.
Non-economic costs include victims of extreme storms, food sources depleted by
drought and flood, islands submerged by rising oceans, and risks to national
security.This all makes for an urgent case for action.

Industry is interested in a carbon fee.
Global droughts have dried up water needed for Coca-Cola’s soda; Nike sees
extreme weather disrupting its supply chain; and billionaires Tom Steyer,
Michael Bloomberg, and Henry Paulson are working to commission an economic
study on financial risks from climate change. Twenty-five of the nation’s
biggest corporations and five major oil companies are planning future growth on
expectations of a carbon fee.

Boozman added that we should let renewables
develop on their own, encouraging a mix of wind, solar, hydro, biomass and
nuclear. But can this happen quickly enough?

Suzanne Goldenberg reported in the Guardian
that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the world
has only about 30 years left before exhausting the rest of the 1,000-gigaton
carbon-emission budget that is estimated to lead to “only” 3.6 degree
Fahrenheit warming. Furthermore, scientists warn that the 3.6-degree target
will fail to avoid a climate disaster. James Hansen warns we cannot afford more
than 1.8 degrees.

Nuclear power is problematic, expensive,
unpopular, and takes many years to become operational. We have the technical
ability now to develop renewable resources, but wind and solar have been
discouraged because of unreliable tax rebates and because fossil-fuel companies
rely on estimated (by the International Energy Agency) subsidies of $544
billion worldwide. Furthermore, those companies do not pay their real costs in
damage to the environment and to our health.

I believe we can truly assist families
battling the high cost of energy through a revenue-neutral carbon fee on point
sources of carbon pollution. A substantial percentage of the money collected should
be returned as a dividend to the consumer to compensate for higher energy
prices. It is estimated that two-thirds of U.S. citizens would break even or
come out ahead. As fossil fuels become
more difficult to extract, the price will rise in any case. We have to use this
small window to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and prepare renewable
infrastructure. Sun and wind are free once the infrastructure is developed.

Only when our energy source does not rely on
petroleum and coal production will American families truly know energy
security.

Regulations are needed, but are unpopular
with conservatives. A carbon fee and dividend is the free-market solution to
emission reductions, and will assist in the development of clean technologies.
This would be an economic boon and job creator, keeping America economically in the world
market.

Renewables may also be our only chance to
preserve this planet for our children.
SB

BURY GHGWith Surging Emission Global Climate Change Goal Is At
Risk, Say UN
By Countercurrents.orgA global goal
for limiting climate crisis is slipping out of reach and governments may have
to find ways to artificially suck GHG from the air if they fail to make deep
cuts in rising emissions by 2030, a draft UN report said. A 25-page draft
summary, by the UN panel of climate experts and due for publication in 2014,
said emissions of heat-trapping gases rose to record levels in the decade to
2010, led by Asian industrial growth

PEOPLE
AWAKE!
KATRINA, SANDY, NEMO AROUSING THE PEOPLE FROM THEIR SLUMBER? Now at last on The
Weather Channel, officials and citizens are talking (a little, TWC is
advertising their series on storms—battering our coasts?—no: in outer space) about the “battle’ against
rising seas and extreme weather. Long
silence and denial, and then Talk of War!
The US WAY? One coastal Long Islander interviewed
wondered if his fellow citizens in the mid-west would help pay for storm rains
and snow and floods in the east.
Solidarity? One for all, all for
one, against the worsening effects of CO2 and Warming, the Mother of all
Catastrophes? Well, yes if you are
talking about government as steward. But
what do our local leaders do and say?
Let’s ask them: What are NWA’s
and Arkansas’ Emergency Management officials and state
legislators doing, or at least thinking about local, regional, national, and
international adaptation? You haven’t
heard? Surely a peep? Do we have any such officials? Well, a few years ago the Governor appointed
a commission to study warming, and it dutifully made some two dozen, of which
the legislature chose the two most innocuous.
Oh, the national government will handle it? With the Republicans in control of the
House? And what did the Democrats do when
they were in control? Who’s in
command? Our corporations? They will respond to climate change, deadly
weather extremes? Just kidding. So:
Silence and denial, and then? We
omitted the global problem? What’s our responsibility? Hong Kong will flood, the sea will cover a
third of Bangladesh, the Maldives
will drown? Solidarity, one for all, a
giant step for humankind? What will
the Long Islander say? What will
Congress do? The President?

But don’t abandon hope. We’re not at the gates of hell, yet. For we have
models for coping with this catastrophe, though one might argue that the
present one might be different from the earlier in degree to such an extent as
to be different in kind. I refer first
to the New Deal’s response to the Depression, drought, unemployment of the
1930s. Roosevelt’s
Works Progress Administration (WPA) built 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt
airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and
18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields.
Jump to today: runways,
seawalls, and home removals safely inland; highways and new inland towns for the displaced and
refugees; bridges and rigorous forest fire fighting enhancement; parks,
playgrounds, and drought projects to save water and land.

If these are insufficient, and many
describe the oncoming climate changes
horrifically, then we have another we-can-do-it model—the total
mobilization organized during WWII.
Almost overnight our factories turned from cars and refrigerators to planes
and tanks, enabling us to fight successfully two immense wars.

In both historical instances our nation
transformed itself not only physically but psychologically and socially. We stared down these cataclysms together,
in true affirmative, cooperative government solidarity. And as that government grew in each case
equally did hope. In 1933, 4,000 banks
failed. In 1934, nine. In December 1941 the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. In
June 1942, the US
stopped Japanese expansion in the Battle of Midway, a major turning point in
the Pacific war.

In these successive disasters of
depression and war, New Deal and Defense of Democracy inspired people to labor
together to withstand all shocks and build a new world. And we have their products to inspire us to
use government for the benefit of all the people, not another Apollo Moon
project, though that shows what we can do in short time, but as with Social Security and the Marshall
Plan.

But warming is progressively destructive. We must prepare now if we are to mitigate
weather extremes and adapt humanely with the people of the world. As did the citizens of the 1930s and 1940s
in response to their cataclysms, we must recognize the weather assaults ahead
as not only our responsibilities but our opportunities, but, if we are to
survive, not in terms of battles and wars, but in the languages and practices
of cooperation and compassion. --Dick
2-9-13.

Many
books and articles promote strengthening local communities, under the headings
of resilience, transition towns, and
other names.

RESILIENCEAMY SEIDL,
FINDING HIGHER GROUND: ADAPTATION IN THE
AGE OF WARMING. Beacon, 2011.
“Finding Higher Ground: Adaptation in
the Age of Warming”
Posted on August 8, 2011 by Climate Science
WatchRather than despair
over the inevitable human suffering, loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels,
and higher temperatures that accompany anthropogenic climate change, ecologist
and author Amy Seidl sees an opportunity for human society to develop new norms
through adaptation – norms that will render it more resilient to the extreme
and unpredictable events that lie ahead, and more sustainable in terms of
environmental impact.

Post by
Katherine O’Konski

On August 1,
Seidl led a discussion about her book, Finding
Higher Ground: Adaptation in the Age of Warming, at Greenpeace USA
headquarters in Washington, D.C. The book is a sequel publication to Early Spring: an Ecologist and Her Children
Wake to a Warming World, and deals with the potential for human society to
adapt to the impending changes in Earth’s climate. She was also featured on the Diane Rehm Show
on August 2, 2011 (with archived webcast) to discuss adaptation to climate
change.

Climate Science
Watch focuses on critical analysis of the collision between science and
politics in current U.S. climate policy, defending the climate science
community and calling out the actions of policymakers in Washington when they
are not in the public interest. Seidl addresses
a different and very difficult question – what direct practical actions can be
taken by individuals and communities to cope adaptively with climate change?

The book
accepts the eventuality of climate change and proposes both mitigation and
adaptation as two inevitable courses of action.
An emerging body of research is finding that some species have already
started evolving in response to higher temperatures, shorter winters, earlier
springs, and different patterns of rainfall.
One of Seidl’s main points is that, just as these species are being
forced to adapt, human society will have to adapt to the changes it has created
and to its position as an agent of natural selection.

Rather than a
destructive force, humans must become a nurturing force. “Humanity is coevolving with nature just as
nature is evolving in response to human action,” Seidl says. “We become the
agents that support living systems when we green the roof of factories and
provide nesting sites for meadowlarks, or when we design constructed wetlands
that not only break down wastewater but serve as a habitat for marsh-loving
species.” The realization that our
communities are vulnerable to droughts, floods, and rising sea level will
encourage us to adapt by building communities to be more resilient to these
events. In doing so, we may limit the environmental damage from future
disasters.

Fully
recognizing our role as a supportive agent will require nothing less than a
massive social movement. There must be
morality associated with the emission of greenhouse gases. Yet Seidl believes adaptation itself will
help move this new thinking along, and thus also encourage mitigation. “Adaptation will be integral to the social
transition that will accompany us in the Age of Warming,” she says. “Like
social movements in the past – women’s right to vote, the eight-hour workday,
and civil rights of African Americans – the climate change movement and its
goal to end carbon emissions will involve the reformation of our lives.”

And what will
the world look like after this movement has taken hold? Seidl envisions a future when renewable
energy is more fully developed and accessible, and where the community scale,
rather than the global scale, is emphasized.
Developing local self-reliance, she maintains, will establish “a
political economy…[that is] less about industrial consumerism and more about
environmental sustainability, justice, and persistence.”

The final
section 179-181 summarize her views—of climate change reality, of how we should
respond humanely, and what we should do.

She recognizes
the fearsome future.

Impending are
“tremendous loss” and “horrors of disaster” because “we have changed Earth’s
systems” (McKibben’s Eaarth) in extremely
“complicated” ways.

How We Must
Respond in Seeking Higher Ground

We must
“believe we can endure.” We must eschew
fatalism and struggle through individual actions to find ways to adapt to
eaarth. We must be persistently
pragmatic, self-reliant, self-sufficient.
We must “care about what we love.”

Actions We Must Take

The 3 pages
mention many levels for individuals seeking higher ground locally, beginning
with “the way we live”—from home gardens and rain barrels, to reducing use of
fossil fuels especially through solar power.
We can use 19th-century practices and 21st-century
technologies for individual adaptations.
But she does mention other levels of seeking higher ground-- “bullet
trains,” low-energy buildings, and migration of nations.

STUDY QUESTIONS

One cluster of
questions might focus on local and global.

Is Seidl’s
Summary an accurate representation of her book? Her main focus is on the individual and
the local? “…we can endure.”

What does she
omit or inadequately represent?

Will the local
focus save us? “…determination to care
about what we love” is enough? Does
her emphasis upon “we” suggest caring about ourselves,
our family, or town, or state, our country?
And that will be sufficient for the planet? What values might she emphasize more? Global empathy and altruism, generosity? Cooperation?
United Nations? In the same
sentence she urges her readers “to protect life that is threatened, to grieve
for what is lost….” Does she refer to a
global level here? Does she intend for
us to read that paragraph to mean we should learn to love all species of the
world, to grieve for what is lost or will be lost soon from Bangladesh to
Tuvalu, and to protect all threatened life from Brazil to Tibet? Does her book as a whole clarify? (See chap. 3 on Migration, esp.
assisted.) Or is global compassion
too much to expect? And self-regarding,
pragmatic localities around the world will be the best instrumentalities we can
muster to prevent the “tremendous loss” from “horrors of disaster,” especially
with the US under the control of government-hating Republicans and
Libertarians, the Middle East bombed and burning?

Rob
Hopkins, The Transition Companion: Making
Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times. 2011.
New ed. 2015.

“Transition is the most
vital social experiment of our times. The Transition movement has already
motivated thousands to begin to adapt their lives to the twin challenge of peak
oil and climate change. Drawing on this collective experience, theTransition
Companionoffers
communities a combination of practical guidance and real vision for the
future.”

Tim Jackson, author ofProsperity
without Growth

“What Rob Hopkins has
done—in this book, and with the Transition movement—simply couldn’t be more
important. We’re coming to a powerful crunch time for our civilization, and if
you read this you’ll be well ahead of the curve in understanding how to prepare
your community. There’s much beauty here, and hope.”
Bill McKibben, author ofEaarth“There is no more important journey we can undertake than the
transition from our current fossil fuel dependency to locally based economic
resiliency. This book is the ideal companion for that journey—optimistic yet
clear-headed; informed by experience yet playful and encouraging. Hopkins’s
wisdom, creativity, and gentle humor pervade each captivating page”.
Richard Heinberg: Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute, author ofThe
End of Growth

You and I know that we have no time to lose in the fight for climate
action. From extreme drought and catastrophic wildfires to devastating
storms and floods, the climate crisis has arrived. And the key to solving
it is educating those around you.

The conversation might be easier than you expect—and we've got your back!

Climate change is taking place. Will we have the wisdom to
survive? The film features thought leaders and activists in the realms of
science, economics and spirituality discussing how we ...See full summary »

Directors and Writers:

Storyline

Climate change is taking place.
Will we have the wisdom to survive? The film features thought leaders and
activists in the realms of science, economics and spirituality discussing how
we can evolve in the face of climate disruption. Interviewees include Bill McKibbin,
Joanna Macy, Roger Payne and young pioneers like Herschelle Milford and Quincy
Saul. Written byAnonymous

Free Online Course at Oklahoma University, "Managing for a Changing Climate." Maybe
this is more cheerful. from: Scharmel Roussel <scharmel2008@gmail.com>Date: Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 10:59 AMHello Enviro Team & Friends!I enrolled in an online course through Oklahoma University on
"Managing for a Changing Climate." It is free.
Any of you want to join me?Here is the link.https://janux.ou.edu/course.tag-nextthought-com-2011-10-nti-courseinfo-fall2016-geogmetr-3523.html Scharmel Roussel

OSTRANDERHow Do You Decide to Have a Baby When
Climate Change Is
Remaking Life on Earth?

Any child born now could, by midlife, see massive
storms inundate coastal cities and the Great Plains turn to dust. Could I have
one, knowing I might not be able to keep her safe? By Madeline Ostrander, The Nation

Adaptation to
Climate Change: ASEAN and Comparative Experiences presents a dynamic
and comprehensive collection of works from legal scholars around the world that
delves into a relatively new frontier on legal aspects of climate change
adaptation with focus on the ASEAN region, both at the regional level as well
as at the national level in some ASEAN countries — such as Malaysia,
Philippines, and Thailand. Other countries not within ASEAN are also
represented, such as Bangladesh, People's Republic of China, Sri Lanka, and the
Republic of Taiwan. In doing so, it surveys one of the most important issues
confronting developing countries today, and the challenges to building
resilient societies. It is an essential source of reference for policy-makers,
administrators, the private sector officials, scientists, academic scholars,
climatologists, NGOs, and CSOs in ASEAN and the world.

Land
Tenure Systems as a Challenge for Disaster Recovery: Adapting to Extreme
Weather Events after Typhoon Haiyan (Daniel Fitzpatrick and
Caroline Compton)

The Role
of ASEAN in Disaster Management: Legal Frameworks and Case Study of
Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda (Koh Kheng-Lian and Rose-Liza
Eisma-Osorio)

THOMAS R. CASTEN, Business OpportunitiesThe Jan.-Feb. no. ofSkeptical Inquiry contains
an essay by Thomas Casten recounting his effortssince 1975to alert
people to the facts of warming and how to
slow or stop C02 emissions by making it profitable: "Reduce
Greenhouse Emissionsand Make
a Profit: My Forty-Year Focus on Climate Change.". In1998his book
on the subject was published: Turning Off the Heat: Why America Must Double Energy
Efficiency to Save Money and Reduce Global Warming (Prometheus).
Looks like a talking point for discussions with deniers. I couldn't find theSIarticle online; maybe avail. now. --Dick

Windfall:The Booming Business of
Global Warming

A fascinating
investigation into how people around the globe are cashing in on a warming world.

McKenzie Funk has spent the
last six years reporting around the world on how we are preparing for a warmer
planet. Funk shows us that the best way to understand the catastrophe of global
warming is to see it through the eyes of those who see it most clearly—as a
market opportunity. Global warming’s physical impacts can be separated into
three broad categories: melt, drought,
and deluge.

To understand how the world is preparing to
warm, Windfall follows
the money.